---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 16:06:41 -0800
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: Michael Kellys libel
Michael Kelly's libel
<http://prorev.com/essays.htm#kelly>
THE DESPERATION OF THE HAWKS came out in a column by Michael Kelly much
like something Richard Nixon or Joe McCarthy would have written in the 1950s:
"The marches in Washington and San Francisco were chiefly sponsored, as was
last October's antiwar march in Washington, by a group the [NY] Times chose
to call in its only passing reference 'the activist group International
Answer.' . . . International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) is
a front group for the communist Workers World Party. The Workers World
Party is, literally, a Stalinist organization. . . This is whom the left
now marches with. The left marches with the Stalinists. The left marches
with those who would maintain in power the leading oppressors of humanity
in the world."
Since the overwhelming majority of those marching had absolutely no
connection with ANSWER, Kelly's remarks were not only tawdry and tacky,
they were libelous, and bring to mind the mischievous thought of 300,000
innocent souls filing individual actions against Kelly and the Washington Post.
These are times for smears, however, because the establishment has run out
of arguments, defenses, and excuses. Kelly's tantrum, and he does seem to
have them, is the product of a mind that - as with, say, Communists and
Christian fundamentalists - places excessive emphasis on theoretical
assumptions and too little on actual facts. Like others of his ilk - such
as David Horowitz and Christopher Hitchens - he learned too much in college
and too little since.
Shoving all of life's experiences into theory is an ultimately
unsatisfactory business and one of the things that causes such phenomena as
wars and bad economics.
While I wasn't as lucky as Ring Lardner Jr, who missed Marx because that
segment of his economics course conflicted with the opening of the Red Sox
season, I did find Marx boring, perhaps because I had already some
experience with real politics, including being a gofer in a couple of
campaigns that had ended 69 years of Republican rule in Philadelphia. No
one in those campaigns had ever mentioned Marx to me, or even Locke, and I
quickly concluded that political science courses were perhaps not the best
place to learn about politics. Besides I could never figure out who was
meant to run the restaurants in Utopia.
People in real politics - even Communists - don't sit around talking about
theories like Horowitz, Kelly or Hitchens. They do things, like opposing
wars or trying to get someone elected. And one of the first principles of
doing things, as opposed to just thinking deeply about them, is to find
others who feel the same way. This can lead sometimes in surprising directions.
In the 1980s, DC elected delegates to a convention at which a constitution
was drafted to be used when and if we ever became a state. Among the
delegates in an 80% Democratic town were some Republicans, Statehood Party
members, and at least one Communist. I was covering a session, sitting
right behind one of the Republicans and enjoying how often he voted with
the Commie, whose predilections he had clearly not surmised. At one point,
he turned to me and said, "Now we'll see how the hard left votes on this
one." I replied, "I hate to tell you this, but you've been voting with the
hard left all night."
A historical rather than a ideological assessment of American communism can
lead in surprising directions as well. For example, as Eric Foner has
noted, about the only predominantly white group in the 1930s that made
civil rights a priority was the Communist Party. Marvin Caplan, later
director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, quotes an anti-civil
rights activist at the time as saying, "Integration is the southern version
of communism."
The Communist Party, buoyed by people with nowhere else to go, fools,
ideological partisans, and FBI infiltrators, survived in no small part
because the rest of the political system wasn't doing what it should. There
were traitors in their midst, but the record suggests that the subversives
within the party probably did less damage to the country than, say, the
double agents within the CIA. For the most part, the Communist Party
provided a home for idealistic but shelterless activists who in better
times would have been somewhere else.
To superimpose the whole Cold War ideological conflict on top of this
peculiarly American phenomenon is to miss much of the story, in particular
the role played by radical socialist Jews and by blacks struggling for
basic rights.
Alfred Kazin described it this way:
"When I was growing up on the Socialist religion, among the most excited
messianic believers since primitive Christianity, it never occurred to me
that there might be Jews who did not believe in socialism. Or that a time
would come when Communists would so harden this religion that it would
produce suicidal fanatics like the Rosenbergs and then equally vehement
ex-radicals who, in their hatred of their past, became far right
extremists. . . "
During the 1960s, many of the movements for change had Communists in their
coalition, in part because of the organizational skills they had developed.
When you're planning a march, you don't have much time for ideology. A
union organizer in the early part of the last century recalled going to
Arkansas and forming a coalition that drew from two remarkably disparate
sources: the black church and the KKK. Why? Because these were the two
groups in the state that knew how to get things organized.
If you're in the midst of action, and not just writing about it from afar,
you learn to cope with the fact that the world doesn't all look like you.
And what matters is what you believe, not what everyone with whom you are
marching believes. Once you have this core of self-understanding you don't
have to run and hide under the table just because Ramsey Clark walks into
the room. And you learn, based on experience and not theory, when to work
with someone and when to get the hell out.
I have known a few Communists, just as I have known a few libertarians,
black nationalists, greens, creationists, single taxers, liberals, and
Washington Post op ed columnists. I have found the Commies to be
rhetorically redundant and sometimes tedious but on the whole less trouble
in an organization than, say, police infiltrators, another subspecies you
meet if you're active long enough. I have never heard a single one mention
Stalin, perhaps because they know I might argue with them, but more likely
because Stalin is about as relevant these days as the Free Soil Party or
the Know Nothings, even though Kelly wishes it otherwise.
One of the reasons that Kelly may be upset is that nothing terrifies the
establishment more than people coming together who shouldn't by all rights
be together. And when you have Republicans and "Stalinists" and soccer moms
and the previously apathetic all in the same march, there's plenty to be
worried about.
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